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While browsing through some back cata-phlogs, I happened upon a post by ~solderpunk[1] discussing, among other related things, a perceived shortcoming of solarpunk as an idea and movement: a forced, odd sort of optimism. This is a critique I share, among some others. I've been chewing this over in my head for a while now, and I'm inspired to share some of my thoughts.
Before I really dig into my criticisms here, a caveat: I haven't delved in and consumed a whole lot of solarpunk literature and art. After explaining how I feel here, you might understand why. It may be that there's already a branch of solarpunk work more in line with my ideals, or others expressing these sentiments; I'd love if that were the case. Please do let me know.
When I first came across solarpunk, I thought I had finally found something doing in my time what cyberpunk did in the 80s - stripping away naively utopian aspects of 60s and 70s science fiction and presenting a gritty, stylized view of what the near future was more likely to be; encouraging those who consumed it to view the present through that lens and find their place within that oncoming world. I believe there is a growing counterculture, of which the small internet is one part, and it is primed for a modern equivalent to cyberpunk: one that is aware of its place in time and the collective conscious, and that presents a stylized view of what resistance might look like in the coming decades.
I think solarpunk aspires to be this, but falls just short in its current state. It succeeds most in inspiring some niche hacker communities to experiment more with off-grid life and sustainable approaches to computing - this is excellent, but only a part of what needs to grow. Solarpunk media, in practice, seems to contain a gap: it encourages technological experimentation in the immediate present, it envisions a far-away successful future, but leaves a wide chasm in the middle. How do we get from our hobbyist projects and small-scale movements to these envisioned utopias?
Honestly, I'm not personally super interested in picturing utopia or an ideological endstate, at least not regularly. It's infinity - you can stretch your arms and your mind as far out as possible, get as close to it as you can, but it will forever be a nebulous something in the unreachable distance. I don't think it's what the movement should revolve around. Being a tad pessimistic, it seems to me that a lot of solarpunk worlds, even the flawed ones, exist as more of an escape than an inspiration - in other words, current solarpunk suffers from many of the same issues as the utopian sci-fi of the mid-century. It is in need of a similar deconstruction to what cyberpunk presented: if you want to inspire a movement, you must present what that movement might actually look like within the near future, not just its desired endstate. In the landscape that we live in, with the future we have before us, I believe we need a grittier vision of what our struggle might ideally look like more than snapshots of far-future success.
This is not an indictment of optimism as a whole in this movement - I don't think solarpunk should share cyberpunk's nihilistic tendencies, far from it. In fact, I even think this current form of solarpunk is necessary for us to move forward, much as utopian sci-fi was needed for cyberpunk to come and deconstruct it. I think solarpunk is the story of creating hope and optimism in the face of dystopia through defiance; a spark nurtured into flame, pushing the future of that dystopia as far as we can toward the ideal world we're now able to picture. We can see the goal, now we need to envision the progress.
It's about time that solarpunk earns its "punk." I intend to write about this more.
[1] solderpunk vs The Windmills - One billion, one continent
(sounds like a band and song title, honestly)